On the main stage and in affinity sessions, you’ll hear from a variety of speakers on topics ranging from typography and social impact, to data visualization and service design. Check out all of the innovative speakers who'll be presenting their work and ideas at “Head, Heart, Hand”.

Leyla Acaroglu is a sustainability strategist and leading proponent of systemic life cycle–based sustainability. She is the founder and director of Eco Innovators, and a designer, social scientist, communicator, researcher and educator with specialist skills in life cycle thinking and behavior change strategies. She lectures at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, where she is also undertaking her Ph.D. Acaroglu’s work spans a range of fields and projects, including the development of “Greenfly,” one of the first online life cycle assessment tools. She was creative director of the award-winning design for sustainability education project, “The Secret Life of Things,” and she was an artist in residence with Autodesk in 2012. She spoke at TED2013, was named one of Melbourne’s Top 100 People of Influence, has presented on radio and television, and wrote an op-ed for TheNew York Times. Acaroglu has also been nominated for—and won—several awards highlighting her contributions to sustainability and design.

Sean Adams is a partner at AdamsMorioka. He is a frequent lecturer and judge, and has been recognized by numerous major competitions and publications. Adams has been cited as one of the 40 most important people shaping design internationally by I.D. Magazine, and was named one of the top 10 influential designers by Graphic Design USA. He is a former president of AIGA, a former national board member and a former president of AIGA Los Angeles. He was named a fellow of the Aspen Design Conference and a 2006 AIGA Fellow. Adams is a professor at Art Center College of Design and the author of multiple books.

AdamsMorioka has been featured in several exhibitions including a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The firm’s clients include the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Cedars-Sinai, Disney, Mohawk Fine Papers, the Metropolitan Opera, Richard Meier & Partners, Sundance, the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Southern California. He is currently the co-president of AIGA.

Deborah Adler is a designer, entrepreneur and mother of two. Her work is guided by the belief that meaningful innovation requires a deep understanding of the people who will use what she creates and the changing world that surrounds them. As the principal of Adler Design, Adler and her team bring new ideas to market and work with industry and nonprofit clients to design experiences, change behaviors and improve outcomes.

Prior to launching her firm, Adler partnered with Target to develop the ClearRx prescription packaging system, which now makes it easier for millions of patients to take their medication. Since then, she’s taken on challenges that range from tackling the leading cause of hospital-acquired infections to reimagining baby bottles as playful objects that connect with children. Adler worked closely with Milton Glaser for five years as his senior designer. She has been featured in New York Magazine, Glamour and NBC Nightly News, and her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Kurt Andersen is the author of the critically acclaimed, best-selling novels Turn of the Century and Heyday. He is the host and co-creator of the Peabody Award-winning public radio show Studio 360 and writes a column about culture and politics for New York magazine. Andersen co-founded Spy magazine and Inside.com, and he served as editor-in-chief of New York and Colors magazines. He has been a cultural columnist for the New Yorker and Time, as well as Time’s architecture and design critic. He has also created prime-time network specials and pilots and written screenplays and an off-Broadway revue. In 2003, New York magazine named him one of the “100 People Who Changed New York” and in 2008 Forbes.com named him one of “The 25 Most Influential Liberals in the U.S. Media.” Andersen is a member of the board of trustees at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and Pratt Institute, was Visionary in Residence at Art Center College of Design in 2009, and has contributed to many books on design, including Spectacle by David Rockwell and Bruce Mau.

Kelli Anderson is a designer and tinkerer who tries to find extraordinary possibilities for ordinary things. In 2008, she worked with the Yes Men to create and distribute a meticulously recreated copy of The New York Times—filled with articles from a progressive utopian future—for which they won the Ars Electronica Award of Distinction. In 2011, she created a paper record player that garnered major attention from numerous media outlets including NPR, Mashable, HOW Magazine, Computer Arts, Slashdot, Make, The Atlantic, Swiss Miss, Wired, the Toronto Star and Kottke. In 2012, she designed and art directed a newspaper that was on view as part of Martha Rosler’s Meta-Monumental Garage Sale at the Museum of Modern Art. Her work has been profiled, praised or featured by Wired UK, New York Magazine, Gestalten, Rockport Publishing, iDN, and Victionary and has been on view at apexart, Jen Bekman Gallery, the New York Public Library and the Museum of Modern Art. She has given talks at Webstock, Creative Mornings, TYPO and TEDx, and sometimes teaches art history at Pratt.

Media legends have legendary beginnings. Ruth Ansel made her debut at Harper’s Bazaar as one of the youngest art directors in the history of magazines, and ever since, she has pushed the boundaries of magazine design. In a career spanning nearly five decades, she has been responsible for era-defining magazine pages and covers for Harper’s Bazaar in the sixties, The New York Times Magazine in the seventies and House & Garden and Vanity Fair in the eighties. Along the way, she has collaborated with Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, Lee Friedlander, Hiro, Andy Warhol, Peter Beard, Bruce Weber, Annie Leibovitz and Tim Walker. She also created film titles for Louis Malle’s cult film, My Dinner with Andre, and designed celebrated editions of Alice in Wonderland and Peter Beard’s The End of the Game.

In the early 1990s Ansel formed her own design studio. She designed such notable books as The Sixties by Richard Avedon, Women and The White Oak Dance Project by Annie Leibovitz and a master monograph for Taschen by Peter Beard. Her studio also designed campaigns for Versace, Karl Lagerfeld and Club Monaco. Recently published projects include a book for photographer Tim Walker called Tim Walker: Storyteller. Ansel has been a guest lecturer at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm twice. She has received the Gold Medal for Design as well as the Society of Publication Design Award for Continuing Excellence in Publication Design. Recently, she was inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame.

Designer. Writer. Educator. Helen Armstrong views design from across the spectrum of a practicing designer, a college professor and a published author. Currently she works an assistant professor of graphic design at Miami University. In addition to teaching, Armstrong works as principal and creative director of her company, Strong Design. She also serves as co-chair of the AIGA Design Educators Community Steering Committee. Her first book, Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field (Princeton Architectural Press), was released in spring 2009. Her second book, Participate: Designing with User-Generated Content, co-authored with Zvezdana Stojmirovic, is now available.

Frank Armstrong’s research and teaching integrate music, as an acoustic time-space information system, with dynamic information visualization and typography. His professional work has been published in numerous books and journals, including Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, Typographic Design: Form and Communication and American Typography Today. His essay “Hearing Type” was published in Loop: AIGA Journal of Interaction Design Education, among others. Armstrong has 20 years of experience as a design consultant, working for clients including Bell Communications Research, GTE, IBM, ITT, Kenan-Flagler Business School, MIT Press and Oxford University Press.

He is currently working on the design and coding of dynamic information visualizations and mobile web apps. Armstrong has two decades of experience as a design educator, teaching information design, interaction design, motion design and typographic design at Academy of Art University, Boston University, Carnegie Mellon University, North Carolina State University, Yale University and more. He is currently serving as a member of the AIGA Design Educators Community Steering Committee. Armstrong received a B.A. degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles and an M.F.A. degree in graphic design from Yale University.

George Aye cofounded Greater Good Studio to increase the impact of his user-centered design practice. Aye started his career as a design consultant at IDEO Chicago working across sectors from consumer electronics to healthcare. He then became the lead designer for the Chicago Transit Authority, designing a prototype bus for the city of Chicago. He is now a tenure-track professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Aye remains wildly optimistic that we can solve the most entrenched problems of our time, together for the greater good.

Eric Baker is an independent designer specializing in branding and identity systems for hospitality, publishing, retail, entertainment and cultural concerns. In addition to his branding work, Baker produces a wide range of work in the fields of hospitality, publishing and corporate communications. He is also a founding partner of Lost Image Desk, a visual research firm in San Francisco and New York. Baker is an author and coauthor of numerous books. His most recent book, American Trademarks: A Compendium, was published by Chronicle Books in 2010. For the past 20 years, he has taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York. A two-time recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts design grant for his independent design history projects, Baker’s work has appeared in Print, Communication Arts, HOW, Domus, Metropolis, Blueprint, I.D. Magazine, British Design & Art Direction, The New York Times, Vanity Fair and Graphis. A native of California, Baker studied at the Academy of Art University and the California College of Arts & Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in San Francisco.

David C. Baker has written four well-received books, and his work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Forbes, CBS Business Network, Businessweek and MarketingProfs. He has contributed to publications by AIGA, Critique, Communication Arts, HOW, Rough, Creative Business, PR Intelligence Report, Creative Planet, In-Review, Graphic Artists Guild and dozens more. He consults exclusively in the field of design, and has worked with nearly 800 firms.

Marian Bantjes lives and works from an island off the West coast of Canada, near Vancouver. She has been variously described as a typographer, designer, artist and writer, and her book, I Wonder (Thames & Hudson, 2010) encompasses all four. Like much of her work, it is a visual treat and an intellectual tease; a manifestation of obsession, an object of beauty; alternately mysterious, thoughtful, personal and funny. Bantjes’ work has been published in books and magazines around the world, and is included in the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York. She has lectured worldwide, and in 2010 she spoke at the renowned TED Conference in Long Beach, California. In 2008, she was accepted as a member of the prestigious international design organization, Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI). A monograph of her work, titled Pretty Pictures will be published by Thames & Hudson in the fall of 2013.

Julie Beeler is the founder of Second Story. With a background in visual design, art history and the liberal arts, she leads the studio in shaping unique, innovative, interactive experiences that pique curiosity, spur discovery and inspire audiences. Beeler has defined and sustained an approach to interactive media design that focuses on reaching diverse audiences while pushing the limits of technological innovation. From concept through completion, she interacts with various industry disciplines, guiding the studio to realize holistic approaches to projects. Beeler is a frequent speaker on a range of topics, including interactive design methodologies, at various conferences and schools across the country. She has also served on the national board of AIGA. Beeler graduated magna cum laude with a B.F.A. in graphic design and art history from the University of the Pacific.

Michael Bierut is a partner in the New York office of the international design consultancy, Pentagram. Prior to joining Pentagram, he worked for 10 years at Vignelli Associates, ultimately as vice president of graphic design. His clients have included The New York Times, Saks Fifth Avenue, the Council of Fashion Designers of America, Harley-Davidson, the Museum of Arts and Design, Atlantic Monthly, the William J. Clinton Foundation, Billboard, New World Symphony, Princeton University, the New York Jets, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Morgan Library and Museum.

Bierut has served as president of the New York chapter of AIGA and as AIGA president. He is an AIGA Medalist, a member of the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame and a recipient of the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum Design Mind Award. A senior critic at the Yale School of Art, Bierut is co-founder of the website Design Observer and author of Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design. He also serves as on the boards of the Architectural League of New York and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

John is a graduate of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where he received a Master’s degree in clinical exercise physiology. He is certified through the American College of Sports Medicine as a health and fitness specialist. Bilderback is the program manager for Step ONE (Optimize withNutrition and Exercise), a public health program designed to change the course of obesity in Hamilton County, Tennessee. He was an adjunct professor in the Department of Health and Human Performance at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga where he spent sevenyears teaching various undergraduate and graduate level courses.

Bilderback serves on several advisory committees including the Tennessee Obesity Taskforce, the Tennessee Grocery Access Taskforce, Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise board and the Chattanooga YMCA's Pioneering Healthier Communities team. Over the course of the past five years, Bilderback has played a major role in the creation of the Partnership for Healthy Living and is the project director for Grow Healthy Together Chattanooga, a Healthy Kids, Healthy Communities grant funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Under his leadership, residents, partner organizations and government agencies have collaborated on more than one million dollars of programmatic and infrastructural improvements like the Chattanooga Mobile Market, revitalized parks and improved neighborhood connectivity.

The owner and founder of Knock Knock, Jen Bilik has a background in book editing, writing, design, and arts and crafts. Knock Knock’s witty, design-driven books, gifts and stationery products are sold in 6,000 stores across the United States, including such retailers as Barnes & Noble and Urban Outfitters, and also have extensive international distribution. For the first five years, Bilik wrote, edited and proofread just about every word on every product Knock Knock released. Since launching the company in 2002, she has also performed every role and made every mistake—and lived to talk about it.

Andrew Blauvelt, chief of communications and audience engagement at the Walker Art Center, oversees interpretation, communications, publishing and visitor experience across all media platforms. From 1998 to 2010, he served as design director of the Walker, which received the 2009 National Design Award for Corporate and Institutional Achievement—the first nonprofit organization to be recognized in that category. Blauvelt also serves as curator of architecture and design at the Walker, where he has organized traveling exhibitions on topics including the contemporary suburban landscape of America, the contemporary prefabricated house and, most recently, “Graphic Design: Now in Production” with the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Prior to his tenure at the Walker, Blauvelt taught the practice and theory of design in several graduate programs including North Carolina State University, Cranbrook Academy of Art and the Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands. He writes about design, art and culture for a variety of publications.

Matteo Bologna is the founding partner and principal of Mucca Design, where he also serves as creative director. Under his direction, the Mucca Design team has solved numerous design challenges and created uniquely successful work for a wide variety of companies like Shinsegae, Whole Foods, Victoria’s Secret, André Balazs Properties, Barnes & Noble, Rizzoli, Starr Restaurants, Patina Restaurant Group, Adobe Systems and Target. Bologna’s team also designed the identities for a variety of classic New York City destinations including Balthazar and Pastis.

The Mucca Design team’s work has been widely recognized by industry publications such as Communication Arts, Eye, Graphis, HOW, Print and STEP, and in competitions and exhibitions organized by AIGA, the Type Directors Club and the Art Directors Club. Bologna is the vice president of the Type Directors Club and a former board member of AIGA/NY. He lectures internationally about branding and typography. His favorite food is Domino's Pizza.

An industrial designer and fine artist by training, Sean Brennan’s passion lies in helping organizations develop innovative and future-focused solutions. For Brennan, inspiration comes from a deep understanding of people, as well as the cultural, technological and business trends that are shaping the world in which we live. Simplifying data into meaningful information helps him find insights that will drive the next idea.

Brennan has led and worked with diverse project teams for global companies across numerous industries. At Continuum, he leads NEXT, a team focused on understanding global trends and their implications for the future. He has taught experience design at Tufts University, spoken at the University of Southern California School of Architecture, been published in Fast Company and won a Gold IDEA Award for his design research for “Colorblind,” a Continuum project about understanding how average Americans relate to green products and marketing.

Anne Burdick is the chair of Media Design Practices, a graduate program at Art Center College of Design. The program features two recently established tracks—Field and Lab—focused on designing for the future of information and communication technologies. In the Field track, students work on social issues in a real-world context—the first cohort just returned from working at UNICEF’s Innovation Lab in Kampala, Uganda. In the Lab track, students work with emerging ideas from technology, science and culture. As the author of the influential essay, “Graduate Education: Preparing Designers for Jobs That Don’t Exist (Yet)” (Adobe Think Tank, 2007), Burdick is a participant in the international dialogue regarding research and advanced degrees in design. In her own practice, Burdick designs award-winning experimental text projects in diverse media. With Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp, she is a coauthor of Digital_Humanities (MIT Press, 2012).

Bernard J. Canniffe is the department head of advertising design, the department head of graphic design and interim program coordinator for the business of art and design at Ringling College of Art and Design. He cofounded PIECE STUDIO, a collaborative, multidisciplinary social design studio, in 2008. He is the recipient of Graphis’ Inspiring Designers for the New Millennium Award, 2000, the Baltimore Step 10 Most Influential Designers Award and The Joseph Binder Award, 2010. Canniffe’s work has been published in Graphis, HOW, STEP, Metropolis, GOOD and PRINT, among others. He has made presentations on design for the common good at international medical, design and academic conferences throughout the world including the Cumulus conference in Portugal; the National Institute of Design Conference in Ahmedabad, India; the Samsung Design Academy in South Korea; and at the P&D Design Conference in Brazil. Canniffe, originally from Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales, has lived in the United States since 1991, and moved to Minneapolis in 2009. He holds a B.A. in graphic design from Newport College of Art and Design, University of Wales, and an M.F.A. from the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Casey Caplowe is the cofounder and chief creative officer of GOOD, a media company and global community of people who give a damn. Since GOOD began, Caplowe has helped to build and shape the look, feel and voice of the brand and all of its creations online, in print, and via video and live events. GOOD’s products, under Caplowe’s direction, have been widely recognized and acclaimed, receiving several National Magazine Award Nominations in 2008 and 2009 and various Webbys in 2008, 2009 and 2013. Notable speaking engagements include the Social Design Symposium in Tokyo, Influx Curated in San Francisco, TEDx in Sao Paulo, SXSW in Austin and the “Insights” series at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Joe Cecere’s passion for design is rivaled only by his passion for business. He drives the creative vision for Little & Company, championing a culture of inventiveness. He is also an avid proponent of using design strategically and building a powerful confluence between creativity and purpose. Cecere’s award-winning work has been featured by the HOW Design Annual, Communication Arts and the Art Directors Club, among others. His speaking engagements have included the HOW Design Conference, the Society of Visual Communications’ student conference and AIGA Minnesota’s “Luncheon Lecture Series.” As an active member of AIGA Minnesota, he frequently works with students and young designers.

Before joining Little & Company, Cecere worked for the Edison Group, the design arm of Minneapolis-based agency Martin /Williams, whose clients included Coleman, General Mills and Catholic Charities. During his time at the Edison Group, Cecere also created the brand identity for U.S. Bank. He has a B.F.A. in visual communications from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Allan Chochinov is chair of the new M.F.A. in Products of Design graduate program at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) and partner of Core77, a New York–based design network serving a global community of designers and design enthusiasts. Chochinov lectures around the world and at professional conferences including IDSA, AIGA and IxDA, and he has been a speaker and guest critic at Yale University, Columbia School of Business and Carnegie Mellon. He has moderated and led workshops and symposia at the Aspen Design Conference, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Compostmodern and Winterhouse.

Prior to SVA and Core77, his work in product design focused on the medical, surgical and diagnostic fields, as well as on consumer products and workplace systems. He has been named on numerous design and utility patents and has received awards from the Art Directors Club, The One Club, I.D. Magazine and Communication Arts. He serves on the boards of AIGA, Designers Accord, Design Ignites Change and DesigNYC.

In 1996, John Christakos cofounded Blu Dot, a design studio and manufacturer of modern furnishings. He has served as CEO since its inception. Blu Dot is sold through more than 150 independent retailers, online and through stand-alone stores in New York, Los Angeles and Sydney. Blu Dot's work has received numerous national and international design awards and has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, Walker Art Center and Centre Pompidou. In 2011, Slate magazine included Christakos in Top Right, its list of the top 25 most innovative and practical thinkers of our time. Prior to Blu Dot, Christakos was the consulting director of Core Group in Minneapolis, where he advised consumer product companies in marketing strategy and branding. He began his career as a consultant with Bain & Company in their Boston office. Christakos graduated with a double major in studio art and economics from Williams College in 1987. He received his M.B.A. from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University in 1993.

Eve Claxton is a writer, radio producer and story consultant based in Brooklyn, New York. She was born in London and educated at Manchester University in the United Kingdom. After moving to the U.S., Claxton began writing for monthly magazines, including the British and American editions of Vogue. Since 2006, she has worked as a ghostwriter on popular memoirs, biographies and self-help books.

Claxton is also the editor of The Book of Life, an anthology of the best memoir writing throughout the ages. In 2009, she joined StoryCorps, a national oral history project, where she sources and shapes stories for their National Public Radio broadcast and bestselling books. She was a member of the team that recently won both a Peabody Award and an Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award for the StoryCorps 9/11 collection. As a story consultant, Claxton has been engaged by major foundations and nonprofits to create and lead storytelling presentations and workshops for their staff.

Cohen has served on the board of advisors of InSource, on the AIGA task force on in-house design and as secretary for the AIGA/NY board of directors. She has also taught classes and conducted seminars for many leading design schools and organizations. Cohen has spoken on business-related issues for the creative industry at events organized by The Association of Registered Graphic Designers Of Ontario, HOW, MYOB and the Design Business Association, as well as numerous AIGA conferences and events.

A native of Massachusetts, Jay Coogan serves as the sixteenth president of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He formerly served as a faculty member and provost for the Rhode Island School of Design. Coogan holds an M.F.A in sculpture from Hunter College, The City University of New York, and a B.A. in visual arts from Brown University. Coogan’s sculptural objects, installations and functional works have been shown at numerous museums and galleries, and include public commissions for the cities of Cambridge, Boston, Providence and Green Bay.

Colleen Corcoran is a graphic designer in Los Angeles. Her work focuses on the use of design as a tool for education and positive change within the urban environment. She works with various community organizations and public agencies on projects that promote active transportation, human-centric public policies and economic and social justice. Prior to joining the design collective RoRoJo&Co (with Rosten Woo, Roman Jaster and Teira Johnson), Corcoran worked at the in-house design studio at Metro, Los Angeles’ public transit agency. She is a cofounder of CicLAvia, a program that opens the city’s streets as a public space for pedestrians and cyclists on Sundays. She also serves on the steering committee of the pedestrian advocacy organization Los Angeles Walks. Corcoran graduated from the California Institute of the Arts with an M.F.A. in graphic design in 2008.

A creative director by trade, Vanessa Corrêa also focuses on connoisseurship, sustainability and the designed life. She is the creative director at the University of California and the co-founder of Coléoptère, a line of fine jewelry that will debut this fall. Outside of design, Corrêa writes for various web sites, including Dwell, and is a heavily followed user on Pinterest. Born in the Bay Area, where she now resides, Corrêa has also lived in Brazil, Norway and various cities across the United States.

Jennifer Daniel is the graphics director at Bloomberg Businessweek. As a visual journalist, she regularly contributes to The New York Times, Wired and the New Yorker, among other publications. After studying in Baltimore, she moved to New York City in 2004. Daniel has since received awards including a D&AD Yellow Pencil, an Art Directors Club Gold Cube and the Type Directors Club “Judges’ Choice.” Daniel has art directed for The New York Times, GOOD magazine and Bloomberg Businessweek. She teaches visual narratives at the School of Visual Arts and lectures around the world, most recently in Milan, Stockholm, Berlin and St. Louis. Daniel recently co-designed American Illustration.

Drew Davies is the founder and design director of Oxide Design Co., a communications and information design firm established in 2001. A past president and advisory board member of the AIGA Nebraska chapter, Davies now serves as the design director for AIGA’s Design for Democracy program. Design for Democracy is currently involved in implementing nationwide ballot design standards for all elections. Davies’ work has been awarded by every major national design competition, including One Show Design, CLIO Awards, HOW, Print and Communication Arts. He also judged the Communication Arts Design Annual, an honor bestowed on only nine national designers each year. He is the only Nebraskan who has ever been selected as a judge in the 51 years of the competition. Davies believes that the most effective method of creating positive change in the world is to clearly communicate the ideas that can make a difference: clarity creates efficacy. He currently serves on the AIGA board of directors as co-president.

Lee Davis is an author, designer and social entrepreneur. He is currently a scholar-in-residence at the Center for Social Design at Maryland Institute College of Art. He is co-founder of NESsT, a pioneering incubator of social businesses solving critical social problems in emerging markets. Since 1997, NESsT has supported more than 3,500 social enterprises across Eastern Europe and Latin America, and the organization was a 2004 winner of the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship. Davis served for 15 years as co-CEO, building NESsT into a global team of 50 with offices across 11 countries, and as chief innovation officer from 2012–2013, when he also served as curator of the 2012 Social Enterprise World Forum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Davis is a Social Enterprise Fellow at the Yale School of Management and was a research fellow and lecturer in social change and development at the Johns Hopkins Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. He is a former program officer in the public participation program at the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe.

Davis is a board member of the Winterhouse Institute and the Haven Women’s Center, a Trustee of NESsT UK and chair of the alumni advisory board of the Toor Cummings Center for International Studies.

Sean Donahue is principal of ResearchCenteredDesign, a Los Angeles based design practice. The former director of research for the humanities and sciences at Art Center College of Design, he is now co-launching MDP+Field, a graduate degree track within Art Centers Graduate Media Design Practices program. The tracks mission is to host a platform for critical dialogue and contribution around design and social practice. Donahue has lectured and published internationally on the practice of media design, design research and social practice. He has lectured and held workshops at Harvard, Cal Arts, IDEO, North Carolina State University, where he was the Designer-in-Residence and currently at the Royal College of Art where he holds the post of Scholar-in-Residence. Donahue's recent work was included in the 2010 Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial Why Design Now?, the 2011 California Design Biennial Action/Reaction, the 2011 AIGA Design Educators Conference New Practices/New Contexts as well as work published in Design as Advocacy, The Journal of Biomedical Informatics, Idea Magazine and he was co-editor of the conversation defining issue of Design Philosophy Papers “Beyond Progressive Design” calling for “new design languages to support Design and Systemic change.

Steve Duenes, associate managing editor at The New York Times, has been with the company since 2004. The graphics department is comprised of 30 journalists and designers who research, design and develop the interactive maps, data visualizations and motion graphics for The New York Times’ digital platforms and printed newspaper. The department is in a state of constant motion, responding to breaking news or continuing stories in addition to contributing to editing efforts on long-term projects. The team played a major role in developing last year’s multimedia story, “Snow Fall,” and they continue to lead integrated, multimedia stories around the newsroom. Duenes has also been a contributor at the New Yorker and a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Maria Elavumkal runs external relations and global recruiting for the newly formed IBM Design organization. She is responsible for owning relations with various external design communities to build a team of highly talented designers for the tremendous transformational initiative IBM has embarked upon. Prior to this role, Elavumkal successfully led various product launch activities and also set best practices to help drive software sales and maintain client relations as a product marketing manager for IBM's Business Process Management portfolio. Elavumkal joined IBM with the 2010 acquisition of Lombardi Software, where she was part of the technical marketing and content team. At IBM, she has been essential to the integration, go-to-market strategy and execution of industry-leading BPM technology. Elavumkal earned her Bachelor's of Science degree in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan in 2009. Originally from New York, she currently calls Austin, Texas home.

Matthew Ericson is the deputy graphics director at The New York Times, where he helps oversee a department of journalists, artists, cartographers and programmers who produce interactive information graphics for NYTimes.com, as well as graphics for the printed newspaper. Ericson joined The Times in 2003 as the national graphics editor; he has produced graphics on a variety of topics, including the Iraq War, three presidential elections and dozens of breaking news stories. The department has received numerous national and international awards for its visual work in helping readers understand the news, including a 2009 Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Award for Communication Design. Before arriving at The Times, Ericson was a graphic artist and website editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer. He has drawn maps for a number of books, including Black Hawk Down and Where Men Win Glory.

You may not believe in reincarnation, but Shelley Evenson has had three lives. She’s been an academic, a consultant and an interaction design guru.

Previously, she worked on design and user experience at Facebook and was a principal user experience designer and manager for Microsoft. She was also an associate professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University.

Now, as the executive director of organizational evolution at Fjord, Evenson’s past lives converge. She leads Fjord’s initiatives to grow talent and advance innovative knowledge-sharing practices across the company, and she infuses fresh thinking into Fjord’s service perspective. As one of the founding members of the International Service Design Network, she brings groundbreaking service design practices to client projects. A contributor to several books and articles on service, interaction and design strategy, Evenson is also a frequent speaker, facilitator and instructor at design and business events around the globe.

David M. Fellman is the president of David Fellman & Associates, a sales and marketing consulting firm based in Cary, North Carolina that that serves numerous segments of small-business America. He is the author of Listen To The Dinosaur, which Selling Power magazine listed as one of its “10 Best Books To Read in 2010,” and his articles on sales, marketing and management topics have appeared in a variety of publications. Fellman is also a popular speaker who has delivered seminars and keynotes at events across the United States, Canada, England, Ireland and Australia.

Kevin Gilboe is the head of global design for the consumer business group at 3M, where he leads an award-winning international team of design experts in building exceptional branded experiences and innovative new products for consumer markets. Prior to joining 3M in 2010, Gilboe led the global design team for the KitchenAid brand at Whirlpool Corporation after pioneering three new organizational capabilities in platform design, visualization and brand identity. He holds an M.S. in product development from Northwestern University and a B.F.A. in industrial design from the University of Michigan. A former practitioner member of the IDSA Education Council, Gilboe has led dozens of development seminars, lectures and projects at both the professional and university level.

Innovator, artist, protagonist and positive provocateur—Maria Giudice has pursued a vision of intelligent, elegant, people-centered design throughout her professional life. Her grasp of the pragmatic, the authentic and the essential have kept Giudice at the forefront of the intersection of design and business for more than 20 years. Under Giudice’s leadership, Hot Studio, the experience design firm she founded in 1997, has grown into a full-service creative agency with offices in San Francisco and New York City. In 2013, Hot Studio was acquired by Facebook, where Maria now works as a director of product design

Annabelle Gould is an associate professor in the Division of Design at the University of Washington. Her focus is on teaching typography as a primary means of communication and creative expression. Gould is an active practitioner, and her clients include the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington, ARCADE magazine and Chronicle Books. She received her B.F.A. from North Carolina State University and her M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She currently serves on the AIGA Design Educators Community Steering Committee. Her work has been recognized by AIGA’s “50 Books/50 Covers Competition,” the Type Directors Club, the Society of Publication Designers and Print magazine.

Ric is the CEO of AIGA, the professional association for design. He is generally involved in all of AIGA’s activities, although his major contributions are in strategy, formulating new initiatives to enhance the competitive success of designers and advocating the value of design.

Ric earned a BA from Dartmouth College, crafted books at Stinehour Press, spent several years in intelligence work in Asia, reported from the Bronx County Courthouse for AP, wrote for Time magazine on business and the economy and then earned an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. Following a career in urban design and public policy consulting, Ric managed the association responsible for strategic planning and legislative advocacy for public television and led a think tank on the future of public television and radio. He has been at AIGA since 1995, developing programs that reinforce the relevance of design as an extraordinary creative gift and a critical element of business strategy.

Allan Haley is the director of words and letters at Monotype. Here he is involved in all aspects of building and maintaining the company’s typeface library. Haley is also responsible for educational content for the company’s websites and is an important link between Monotype and the graphic design and design education communities. Prior working for Monotype, Haley was principal of Resolution, a consulting firm with expertise in fonts, font technology, type and typographic communication. He was also executive vice president of International Typeface Corporation. Haley is ex officio chairman of the Board of the Society of Typographic Aficionados, and past president of the New York Type Directors Club. He is highly regarded as an educator and is a frequently requested speaker at national computer and design conferences. Haley is also a prolific writer, with six books on type and graphic communication and hundreds of articles for graphic design publications to his credit.

Since opening in 1999, Firebelly has produced work that they believe in and clients trust—work that has merited mention in a journal here and a design archive there. While certainly proud of the studio’s history and accomplishments, Dawn Hancock feels no need to rehash the past. She prefers to live and work in the present, to make something rich and sustainable that has a lasting impact. Though the studio remains Hancock’s focal point and her center of gravity, Firebelly has expanded into a bustling little world that she hustles across daily—a world built with her own two hands, the fearless work of her team and an abundance of neighborhood support. Hancock was recently named one of “The 11 Most Generous Designers” by Fast Company and Catchafire.

Michael Hart is a founder and creative co-chair of mono, a Minneapolis-based branding and advertising agency. Since its founding in 2004, mono’s work and philosophy of simplicity have attracted a well-respected roster of clients, including Herman Miller, Target, Harvard Business School, MSNBC, Virgin, Blu Dot, Fisker Automotive and Apple. An early believer in cross-disciplinary teams, technology and innovation, mono has won everything from AIGA design awards to Cannes Cyber Lions to One Show Entertainment pencils. mono has been named “Agency of the Year” for the last three years in a row by the American Association of Advertising Agencies. Prior to forming mono, Hart was a creative director at Fallon in Minneapolis, creating all the work behind Dyson’s successful launch in the U.S., as well as the Emmy Award-winning “Stay Curious” campaign for PBS.

Sagi Haviv is a partner and designer at Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv. Among his numerous projects for the firm are the logo designs and identity systems for the Library of Congress, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, CFA Institute, Harvard University Press, Conservation International, Women’s World Banking and Armani Exchange. Haviv designed the award-winning animation “Logomotion,” a ten-minute tribute to the firm’s famous trademarks that introduced a new approach to showcasing a firm’s portfolio. Haviv’s other motion graphics work includes the opening sequence for the Emmy Award–winning PBS documentary series Carrier, and for the closing performance at Alicia Keys’ 2009 Keep-A-Child-Alive benefit.

Haviv first joined Chermayeff & Geismar in 2003 after graduating from The Cooper Union School of Art. He teaches visual identity design at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He is co-author of Identify: Basic Principles Of Identity Design in the Iconic Trademarks of Chermayeff & Geismar (Print Publishers, 2011).

Jessica Helfand is an award-winning writer, educator and designer. A partner with William Drenttel in Winterhouse Institute and a founding editor of Design Observer, she is a former columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines and has written for numerous national publications including Aperture, Los Angeles Times Book Review and The New Republic. She is the author of several books including Screen:Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture; Reinventing the Wheel;and Scrapbooks: An American History.

A previous appointee to the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, she is also a recent laureate of the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, and, with William Drenttel, she was the first-ever recipient of the Henry Wolf Residency at the American Academy in Rome. Helfand teaches at Yale University where she is senior critic in the School of Art and a lecturer in Yale College. In 2013, she was awarded the AIGA Medal.

Jessica Karle Heltzel is a designer and writer living and working in New York. She is the cofounder of Kern and Burn and The People’s Pennant. She received her M.F.A. in graphic design from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She works as a designer for General Assembly and can often be spotted carrying 14 bags through the streets of Manhattan.

Internationally recognized as a powerful force in changing the way people approach the business of design, Jeni Herberger teaches creative professionals and corporate leaders to connect and communicate. Known for her ability to break down the wall between business policy and design strategy, Herberger has spent the past two decades working with leaders to identify practical strategies on better business practices. By conducting on-site training and consulting, she offers businesses action plans that are focused on getting results.

Herberger is host of blog talk radio’s Talk Story with Jeni, a bi-weekly show that invites listeners into conversations between key design thinkers. She writes articles for various industry publications including HOW, Communication Arts and Business Journal, and she is a frequent speaker for AIGA, American Marketing Association, AdClub, RGD and the HOW Design Conference.

Kit Hinrichs served as principal in several design offices in New York and San Francisco and spent 23 years as a partner of Pentagram before opening Studio Hinrichs in 2009. His design experience incorporates a wide range of projects, including corporate communications, brand development, promotion, packaging, catalogs, environmental graphics, editorial and exhibition design. Hinrichs’ work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress. He has co-authored five books, including Typewise and Long May She. He co-founded @issue: The Journal of Business and Design and launched the @issue Design Conference. Hinrichs has chaired the AIGA California Show, the AIGA Business Conference and San Francisco Design Lecture Series. He has also co-chaired the Alliance Graphique Internationale San Francisco Congress. Hinrichs is an AIGA medalist

Tim Hoover is a freelance designer and writer living and working in Brooklyn. He is the cofounder of Kern and Burn and The People’s Pennant, and former partner at The Infantree. He received his M.F.A. in graphic design from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He’s quasi-Amish, and overly certain he’s on the verge of starting a really-disruptive-and-valuable company.

Randy J. Hunt is creative director at Etsy where he leads a team of designers creating the end-to-end experience, both online and offline. He feels strongly that designers must be able to build what they design, a perspective that fits naturally with Etsy’s culture of making and love of craftsmanship. Hunt co-founded Supermarket, a curated design marketplace, and founded Citizen Scholar Inc., a studio that worked with culture, education, social and environmental clients including Broadway Across America, DoSomething.org, the School of Visual Arts and numerous writers and photographers.

Hunt writes and lectures about design and has been a visiting designer and critic at many colleges and universities. His book, Product Design for the Web, will be published by New Riders in November 2013. Hunt is a graduate of the M.F.A. Designer as Author program at the School of Visual Arts. In 2008, he was included in Print magazine’s “New Visual Artists” and STEP Inside Design’s “Field Guide to Emerging Talent.”

Terry Irwin is the head of the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University and has been teaching at the university level since 1986. She has been an adjunct professor at Otis/Parsons in Los Angeles, California College of the Arts and the University of Dundee in Scotland. She has also guest taught and lectured widely in North America and Europe.

Irwin was a founding partner of the San Francisco office of the international design firm MetaDesign, where she served as creative director for nearly 10 years. In 2003, she moved to Devon, England to pursue a master’s degree in holistic science at Schumacher College, an international center for ecological studies. Irwin subsequently joined the faculty there in 2004. In 2007, she moved to Scotland to undertake Ph.D. studies at the Centre for the Study of Natural Design at the University of Dundee.

Irwin’s research explores how living systems principles can inform a more appropriate and responsible way to design. She holds an M.F.A. in design from the Allgemeine Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland.

Karl Isaac oversees Adobe’s brand strategy group, managing the complete Adobe portfolio including the corporate brand, product and solution brands, and corporate programs. He also leads Adobe’s marketing innovation program and serves as a key brand evangelist and leader within the company. During his career, Isaac has led brand and marketing strategy in both client- and agency-side roles for some of the world’s most recognized brands. His previous roles include executive director, digital branding at Landor; client partner at Razorfish; director, branding and marketing strategy at Microsoft; and senior product manager at Apple. Isaac teaches account planning at Miami Ad School in San Francisco. He studied design at Hampshire College and earned a Master of Architecture degree from UCLA. He also holds an M.B.A. from Duke University, where he focused on high-tech marketing.

Nicole Jacek is an award-winning German graphic designer. She began at the feet of the masters, working with Stefan Sagmeister at Sagmeister Inc. in New York and Ian Anderson at the Designers Republic in Sheffield, England. Her work has been published in numerous magazines and books around the world. Jacek was named one of Print’s New Visual Artists in 2009 and a Young Gun 8 by the Art Directors Club. She is the youngest Art Directors Club board member. Jacek was formerly creative director of karlssonwilker inc. in New York City, and she is currently opening her studio, NJ(L.A.)™, in Venice Beach, California. Her clients have included Vitra, MINI/BMW, Adobe, Carmina Campus (Ilaria Venturini Fendi), Coca-Cola, 55DSL, Wolf-Gordon, Harvard University and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, among many others.

Matthew Jacobson is senior vice president of design for the global marketing agency, DigitasLBi. In the mid-1990's, Jacobson launched the critically acclaimed record label Le Grand Magistery with the express purpose of designing album covers. Jacobson was later named head of design for rock legend Jack White's innovative and highly collectible label, Third Man Records. There, he designed records for artists including Beck, Jerry Lee Lewis, Karen Elson, The White Stripes and Tempest Storm, among others. Early in his career, Jacobson was the first designer hired to work for Bonnie Siegler and Emily Oberman's multidisciplinary design studio, Number 17. Jacobson has continued working with both of them intermittently over the past two decades, most recently designing the identity for the “Head, Heart, Hand” conference, chaired by Siegler.

Ryan Jacoby uncovers and designs new options for growth. He’s the founder of a new design and innovation company. He is also on the team of Collaborative Fund, a venture firm based in New York City, and teaches in the Interaction Design masters program at the School of Visual Arts. Working across industries such as retail, education, consumer services, financial services and health care, Jacoby helps companies big and small to conceive and build new businesses, envision new brand platforms, and design products and services. Prior to founding his new firm, Jacoby led teams and relationships at the design and innovation firm IDEO. He was a founding member and location head of IDEO New York office and built the Business Design discipline at the firm.

Karin Jager is an educator, designer and advocate for the design profession. She heads the new Graphic and Digital Design program at the University of the Fraser Valley in Mission, British Columbia, and serves the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada (GDC) as the national vice president of education. Jager began teaching communication design in 1995 at Capilano University, where she established the highly successful 3-year IDEA diploma program in 2001. She is a graduate of Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and holds a Master’s Degree in Education majoring in post-secondary leadership from Simon Fraser University. Her professional design practice specializes in corporate communication and information design, and spans 25 years. Jager’s current focus in education is on program development and academic research. Her research interests include an expansive study on graphic design education in Canada where her findings point to a need for a more symbiotic relationship between education and the design profession.

Originally from Wichita, Kansas, Amy Johnson graduated from Iowa State University with a B.F.A. in Graphic Design and later completed her M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Now a designer and educator, Johnson’s work has been published in Communication Arts and Print. She has won several Best of Shows as well as Gold and Silver Medals and Citations of Merit in numerous design competitions through the Art Directors club and the ADDYs.

Johnson presently teaches graphic design at the graduate and undergraduate level at the University of Central Oklahoma where she also serves as the assistant chair of the Department of Design. Her teaching expertise lies in creating community engagement through student-run practice and in three dimensional experience design. Johnson served on the founding board for AIGA Oklahoma as the programming chair and has continued to serve on the board in various roles, most recently as the education chair. In 2012, she was named an AIGA Fellow.

Seth Johnson is a designer, strategist, educator and organizational leader. His Minneapolis-based consultancy collaborates with teams and clients in a wide range of business categories to conceive and implement branding and communications solutions. A past president of AIGA Minnesota, Johnson also served as its treasurer and co-director of education and founded its mentor program. Through his volunteer work, he strives to help emerging designers bridge the gaps between education and professional practice. He speaks frequently at universities and design organizations around the nation, serves on the governing board of Art Buddies and was a founding member of “FEAST MPLS.”

Kaiser has served Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA) for more than 14 years. He leads the creative strategy and development team, integrating web, social and video communications; marketing initiatives; and advertising campaigns for BGCA and local clubs. Kaiser is also is responsible for overseeing projects for print, web, mobile, television and radio advertisement. Kaiser played an integral role in launching BGCA’s most recent brand platform, “Great Futures Start Here,” which features more than 21 prominent Boys & Girls Club alumni including Denzel Washington, Jennifer Lopez and many others. He’s led top cause campaigns featuring partners such as Sprint, Disney, Charles Schwab, Kimberly-Clark and Staples.

Prior to joining BGCA, Kaiser’s experience included creative work in the real estate, retail and television sectors. Previous clients include Macy’s, the Cayman Islands Department of Tourism, Deloitte & Touche and Johns Hopkins University. A graduate of the Art Institute of Atlanta with a degree in visual communications, Kaiser is an active member of AIGA.

Linda Joy Kattwinkel, Esq. has been a visual artist for more than 40 years and an attorney and mediator for the arts community for more than 20 years. She received her B.F.A. cum laude in communications arts from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she studied with Philip Meggs. She was a graphic designer and illustrator for 13 years before receiving her law degree cum laude from Hastings College of the Law in 1991. As a member of the law firm Owen, Wickersham & Erickson, Kattwinkel represents designers and visual artists in matters of intellectual property and arts law, such as copyright and trademark protection, infringement, licensing and gallery contracts. She is the author of “Legalities,” an online column on legal issues for designers. With Shel Perkins, she co-authored AIGA’s Standard Form of Agreement for Design Services. She speaks frequently to lawyers and designers on arts law, including speaking engagements at several AIGA national conferences.

Jennifer Kinon is a designer and educator based in New York City. She co-founded, with Bobby C. Martin Jr., the branding and design agency OCD | The Original Champions of Design. Together they develop brand and identity systems for a broad range of clients including the National Basketball Association, Girl Scouts of the USA and Friends of the High Line. They have received awards from the Art Directors Club, D&AD, AIGA, the Type Directors Club and Print, and they were awarded a “Best of Show” and “Judge’s Pick” in the 2011 Brand New Awards. Kinon recently served as the president of AIGA New York. Prior to founding OCD, she worked in the New York office of Pentagram with Michael Bierut, served as design director of New York City’s 2012 Olympic Bid and worked as art director for Graphis Inc. She graduated from the University of Michigan and later earned an M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts. Kinon is the first graduate from that program to join its faculty.

Scott Kirkwood began his publishing career editing coupon books but ever since moving to Washington, DC in 1994 he’s been writing and editing for nonprofit organizations including the Humane Society of the United States and the Child Welfare League of America. He’s now the senior director of publications for the National Parks Conservation Association and the editor of National Parks magazine, which means he goes to amazing places, writes about fascinating subjects and looks at lots of pretty pictures.

Erica Kochi co-founded and co-leads UNICEF’s Innovation Unit, a group tasked with identifying, prototyping and scaling technologies and practices that improve UNICEF’s work on the ground. Kochi also serves as innovation advisor to UNICEF’s executive director. She was included on the TIME 100 “World’s Most Influential People” list in 2013, and her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, The Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Forbes, Fast Company, Change Observer, Core77 and TechCrunch. UNICEF Innovation is responsible for the Digital Drum, which received recognition from TIME as one of the “50 Best Inventions of 2011,” a gold and silver International Design Excellence Award from IDSA and a Red Hat prize for being one of three top open source projects. They also created the award-winning RapidSMS to help improve the speed and quality of data collection for health and education services.

Gideon Kossoff is a social ecologist and design theorist whose research focuses on the relationships between humans and the natural environment, and humans and the built and designed world, as the foundation for a sustainable society. For many years Kossoff was program administrator and course tutor for the M.S. in holistic science at Schumacher College in Devon, England, an international center for ecological studies. He developed Schumacher’s extensive library, which includes thousands of volumes on topics such as holistic science, the esoteric tradition, philosophy and history of science, ecology, globalization, ecopsychology and ecodesign, and he has spent many years exploring utopianism, the history of anti-authoritarian thought and related fields.

Kossoff holds a Ph.D. in design from the University of Dundee, Scotland. His thesis was entitled “Holism and the Reconstitution of Everyday Life: a Framework for Transition to a Sustainable Society” and his thoughts on transition design are summarized in the recent book Grow Small, Think Beautiful.

With his expertise in sleight of hand and puzzles, David Kwong is one of the leading performers today. As a magician and producer, Kwong has uniquely combined his love for film and illusion. A longtime “cruciverbalist” (crossword puzzle constructor), Kwong routinely creates puzzles for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and other national publications. He is the founder of the Misdirectors Guild, an elite group of magicians that specialize in magic for film and television. Most recently, as head consultant, he designed the illusions for the feature film Now You See Me and taught magic to Jesse Eisenberg, Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson and Isla Fisher. His company also oversaw the magic in The Immigrant, which features Jeremy Renner as a turn-of-the-century magician. Kwong consulted on The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, starring Steve Carell and Jim Carrey, and he is producing a secret project with J. J. Abrams. Kwong is perhaps Harvard University’s only graduate to have studied the history of magic. He is Soho House’s resident magician and frequently performs his show at Soho Houses throughout the world.

Nicole Lazzaro is a world-renowned game researcher, designer and speaker who makes games more fun. In 2004, Lazzaro discovered the “Four Keys to Fun,” a model used by game developers worldwide. She employed this model to design the iPhone’s first accelerometer game in 2007, now called Tilt World. The goal of the game is to plant one million trees in Madagascar. Both FastCompany and Gamasutra have named Lazzaro—whose work on user experience and emotion spans two decades—one of the most influential women in the gaming industry. She has worked with Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, DICE and The White House to make games more fun and unlock human potential to improve our world.

Stephnee Leathers is senior director of creative services for Robert Half, the world’s first and largest specialized staffing firm and parent company of The Creative Group, which places interactive, design and marketing professionals on a project and full-time basis. A passionately devoted design leader, Leathers began her career with a small design firm and later moved to a midsize B2B agency and larger agencies thereafter. She landed at Robert Half in 2001 as an art director and now leads branding initiatives for the company’s seven specialized staffing brands and Protiviti, a global business consulting and internal audit firm. Along with having a flair for strategy, process and collaboration, Leathers adapts to change and promotes creative problem solving, empowering her award-winning team of 30 design professionals.

Faythe Levine works as an independent researcher, multimedia artist, curator, author and collector. She is based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her most recent project, a book and documentary titled Sign Painters, examines the trade of traditional hand lettering in America. Levine curates Sky High Gallery and produces the annual event “Art vs. Craft” in Milwaukee. Levine’s first book and film, Handmade Nation: The Rise of D.I.Y. Art, Craft and Design (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), received widespread attention, and her personal artwork and writing have been published and exhibited internationally. She also documents her community-based projects, travels and experiences on her website.

Principal and founder of Studio On Fire, Ben Levitz received his B.F.A. in communication design from the College of Visual Arts. He spent nearly a decade as a designer working with Kilter, Larsen and Carmichael Lynch Thorburn. His creative expertise has focused on design as a branding tool for a large and varied list of national companies with work consistently appearing in the award shows and publications of AIGA, Communication Arts, FPO, Graphis, PrintMagazine and the Type Directors Club Annual. He has served as an adjunct faculty member at the College of Visual Arts teaching advanced typography.

The studio began in 1999 with a vision of uniquely combining two principles: design and craft. With a growing letterpress shop, Levitz left the agency world in 2006 to run the studio full time. The dozen or so folks now at Studio On Fire are designers and purveyors of artisan print craft. In addition to printing custom work for agencies and firms worldwide, the studio produces its own design and letterpress projects. A collection of this work is compiled in the book, Studio On Fire: Iron Beasts Make Great Beauty (Gestalten, 2011).

Michael Lin is the founder and CEO of Fenix International Inc., a venture capital funded for-profit social enterprise producing renewable energy solutions for emerging markets. A serial entrepreneur, Lin previously founded Vestal Design, an award-winning design firm, and B.MINIMA, an eco-solutions company. He was a lecturer at Stanford University where he taught a course entitled “Sustainable Development Studio,” and he has lectured in design, robotics and social entrepreneurship at Yale University.

Lin has served on the board of advisors for several eco-startups, consulted for Apple on climate change, advised on sustainable design with Wal-Mart and the Stanford d.School, and worked with Al Gore on his “Inconvenient Truth” presentation as part of The Climate Project. He is a recipient of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s People, Prosperity and the Planet Award, Popular Mechanics’ Breakthrough Award, Businessweek’s IDEA Award and two Spark Design Awards. He earned a B.S. and M.S. in mechanical engineering and design from Stanford University.

The legendary George Lois is one of the most creative, prolific advertising communicators of our time. Running his own ad agencies, Lois is renowned for dozens of “marketing miracles.” He was an early pioneer of the landmark creative revolution in American advertising. Lois introduced and popularized the Xerox culture, saved USA Today from extinction with his breakthrough “singing” television campaign and made MTV a huge success with his “I Want My MTV” campaign. He has also created ad campaigns for four United States senators: Jacob Javits, Warren Magnuson, Hugh Scott and Robert Kennedy. The only music video Lois ever created, for “Jokerman” by Bob Dylan, won the MTV Best Music Video of the Year Award in 1983. Lois is the author of several books, including The Art of Advertising,What’s the Big Idea?, Covering the ’60s, $ellebrity, Iconic America and Damn Good Advice (For People with Talent!). In 2008, the Museum of Modern Art installed 38 of his iconic Esquire covers in its permanent collection. Lois has been inducted into the Art Directors Hall of Fame and The One Club Creative Hall of Fame, and he has received lifetime achievement awards including the AIGA Medal and the Herb Lubalin Award from the Society of Publication Designers.

Bobby C. Martin Jr. is a designer and educator based in New York City. He co-founded, with Jennifer Kinon, the branding and design agency, OCD | The Original Champions of Design. Together they develop brand and identity systems for a broad range of clients including the National Basketball Association, Girl Scouts of the USA and Friends of the High Line. They have received awards from the Art Directors Club, D&AD, AIGA, the Type Directors Club and Print, and they were awarded a “Best of Show” and “Judge's Pick” in the 2011 Brand New Awards. Prior to founding OCD, Martin developed brand experiences from the inside out while leading internal design teams at Nokia, in London, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. He has also served on the board of directors of AIGA New York. Martin teaches identity design at The Cooper Union and recently joined the faculty of the School of Visual Arts, where he received his M.F.A. in design. He also has a degree from Virginia Commonwealth University.

For more than two decades, Su Mathews Hale has thrived at the intersection of graphic design and brand strategy. Using the power of design to develop inspiring creations while solving business problems, Mathews Hale has worked with a broad range of notable clients including Chase, Chick-fil-A, Hayneedle, Hershey’s, Hyatt, IHG, Liz Claiborne, New York Public Library, RadioShack, Red Robin, Samsung, Shutterstock and the U.S. Department of State.

As a senior partner in design for Lippincott, Mathews Hale works on global projects spanning the full gamut of brand creation and identity development. She served as creative director on the famed Wal-Mart rebranding. Recently, she led the creative team for the refreshed brand identity of eBay. Prior to joining Lippincott, Mathews Hale was an associate partner at Pentagram Design. A frequent speaker and design judge, Mathews Hale was selected by Graphic Design USA as one of the 2013 “People to Watch.” Her work has been published in books such as Designing Brand Identity, Go Logo, Logo Lounge V and Symbol, and featured in leading publications such as Communication Arts, Graphis, Identity and Print.

Mathews Hale holds a B.F.A. in graphic communication and an associate degree in advertising design, both from The Fashion Institute of Technology. She currently serves on the AIGA board of directors where she will be spearheading a Women’s Leadership Initiative.

Kirill Mazin has more than a decade of experience working as a designer and interactive developer for such clients as Pearson Education, McGraw-Hill, Specialized, the American Museum of Natural History, the Department of Defense and the University of California. His work has been recognized by AIGA, Communication Arts, HOW and the University and College Designers Association. Mazin is currently focusing on exploration of new narrative structures for interactive storytelling, and he is particularly interested in the possibilities offered by the intersection of graphic design and programming. Mazin holds a bachelor’s degree in art from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Originally from Berkeley, California, Lara McCormick has an M.F.A. in design from the School of Visual Arts, and a postgraduate certificate in typography from Cooper Union. McCormick has taught design at the School of Visual Arts and is currently the chair of the graphic design program at the New Hampshire Institute of Art. She is also a member of the AIGA Design Educators Community Steering Committee. McCormick enjoys coming up with new and inventive ways to play with, teach and invent typography. Her book, Playing with Type, is now available from Rockport Press.

As director of user experience, Pamela Mead leads the global UX team for all global products and services developed within Telefonica Digital. She evangelizes research to build a culture of engaging with customers throughout the innovation, definition, design and delivery activities of products. With products in market, she is also passionate about learning in market and the strategic evolution of services to deliver business results. Her team is made up of researchers, interaction designers, visual designers, prototypers and writers located in Madrid, Barcelona, London and Sao Paulo. Mead has more than 15 years of experience as a user experience expert and product design strategist. She has consulted with leading companies and start-ups on user experience best practices, specifically mobile user experience strategies. Before joining Telefónica in 2009, she was the global user experience director for Yahoo! Mobile. Prior to moving to design leadership positions inside large corporations, she led interdisciplinary teams at leading design consulting firms including MetaDesign and Doblin.

Jeremy Mendes is a Vancouver-based artist with more than 12 years of experience working on interactive projects. He is currently working with the National Film board of Canada as a creator and interactive producer. His recent success with Bear 71 has landed numerous awards including a Cannes Cyber Lion and FWA Site of the Year 2012. He has attended festivals internationally, performing a live version of the project and speaking to audiences about interactive work. Other National Film Board projects include the co-creation of This Land, along with additional titles due to launch this year. These interactive projects truly capitalize on his collective experience and requiring an understanding of story, culture, art and design conveyed through interactive experiences. Mendes graduated from Emily Carr Univertisy of Art + Design in 1996 and specializes in art direction, creative direction, design and illustration. His experience spans storytelling, interactive design, motion design, information design, creative conceptual work, brand development and advertising.

Diane Mikhael is a design educator for more than 17 years with a passion for teaching learning motivation and creative thinking processes for creative groups. Mikhael received an M.A. in Design from Middlesex University, London, in 2000 and an International recognition certificate from the International Society of Typographic Designers (ISTD), London, 1996. Mikhael has served as an assistant professor of graphic design at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar since 2008. Previously, she was a faculty member of the Notre Dame University Lebanon. Mikhael is also co-director of MEDEA: the Middle East Design Educators Association.

Mikhael’s research has included Arabic type designs, sustainability of Arabic culture, design and emotions, creative strategies in design methods and praxis, geography of design thoughts in cross-cultural and intercultural environment, and the definition of indigenous audience. As part of her research dissemination, she has lectured in various international, regional and local institutions and conferences. Mikhael has been a guest speaker on television discussing design principles and theories.

Bill Moran is a third-generation letterpress printer, graphic designer and professor of printing history at the University of Minnesota. Since 2001, Moran has volunteered at Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in a variety of roles. In 2004, he co-authored and published Hamilton Wood Type: A History in Headlines, which chronicles the history of the company and documents contemporary projects undertaken by the museum’s visiting artists. He currently serves as the artistic director of the museum, where he is responsible for design of merchandise, annual programming and the museum’s visual brand. Moran also maintains his design practice, Blinc Publishing, and leads an annual “Travels in Typography” trip to Spain, Germany and Italy.

Jim Moran received his apprenticeship from Moran’s Quality Print Shop in Green Bay, Wisconsin, serving as printer’s devil, pressman, partner and owner. He continued his education at various print shops before becoming the director of the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in 2009. Moran oversees all facets of museum operation, including maintaining and documenting the world’s largest collection of wood type, running and repairing the collection of antique presses and archiving and restoring the collection of 20th century decorative and advertising plates. He also teaches workshops in letterpress printing for the museum. Moran has presented talks and run workshops for the AIGA Design Conference, TypeCon, Fossil World Headquarters, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Center for Book and Paper Arts, School of Visual Concepts and the American Printing History Association Conference. He is currently moving the museum’s 35,000 square feet of type and equipment into a new home in Two Rivers, Wisconsin.

Jennifer Morla established Morla Design in 1984. With more than 300 awards of excellence, Morla Design’s work has been recognized by virtually every organization in the field of visual communication. She has created identity and architectural design programs for Levi Strauss, Williams-Sonoma, Design Within Reach, Herman Miller, SculptureCenter in New York City and the Mexican Museum in San Francisco.

Morla’s work is part of the permanent collections of MoMA, SFMOMA and the Smithsonian Institution. She has had solo design exhibitions at SFMOMA and the DDD Gallery in Japan. Morla lectures and judges internationally, teaches graduate design at California College of the Arts and is a recipient of the AIGA Medal. Most recently, she was invited to participate in an artist residency at the Workshop Residence in San Francisco, where she created felt flooring and room dividers based on typographic investigations.

Jacky Myint is an interactive designer based in New York who works at the online arm of TheNew York Times. Myint crafts new forms of digital storytelling with data, moving images and code—underpinned by great writing, reporting and design. Since attending graduate school at Parsons The New School for Design, she has been exploring how to communicate through design and code, collaborating with smart, talented folks on innovative projects in multimedia storytelling. Myint is inspired by the ways in which technology has allowed for new possibilities to interact with visual narrative—from the participatory to the spatial.

Jake Nickell is Threadless’ young and fearless entrepreneurial leader. Nickell has a passion for learning new things, from how to get T-shirts made to figuring out how to design and program an e-commerce website. Currently, he’s focused on running the worldwide, hugely successful business that Threadless has become. He likes to think creatively and unconventionally about how to keep Threadless one step ahead by encouraging nutty employee ideas and staying away from the “business” side of running a business.

Award-winning writer Bruce Nussbaum is the former assistant managing editor for Businessweek and professor of innovation and design at Parsons The New School for Design. In addition to blogging for Fast Company and Harvard Business Review, Nussbaum is founder of the online channel Innovation & Design and the quarterly innovation magazine IN: Inside Innovation. Nussbaum is responsible for starting Businessweek’s coverage of the annual Industrial Designers Excellence Awards, the Businessweek/Architectural Record Awards for architecture and “The World’s Most Innovating Companies” survey. In 2005, I.D. magazine named Nussbaum as one of the forty most influential people in design. In 2008, he was a finalist in the annual Design Mind Award given by the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former member of the Global Agenda Council on Design & Innovation at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Eiko Ojala is an Estonian illustrator. Inspired by his father, an architect, Ojala went on to study interior design and nature guiding. Eventually, his path led him to illustration. Ojala combines handcraft and digital image making to create landscapes, figures and portraits that appear as if they have been cut from paper. As part of his design process, Ojala studies the forms of shapes, working closely with light and shadow and keeping his illustrations minimal. Ojala's illustrations show up frequently on book covers, in magazines and in major media such as The New York Times. He has also been nominated for a Young IIllustrators Award by Illustratve and for the YCN Professional Award. He has worked with the V&A Museum, the Harvard Business Review and Wired.

Piyush Patel is the founder and CEO of Digital-Tutors, the world’s largest CG and VFX training resource for people who make movies and games. Patel, a former tenured college instructor who taught advanced computer graphics, was frustrated with a lack of curriculum and resources in this emerging field. Over the past decade, he has helped develop and create learning materials to teach more than 200,000 artists worldwide and create a global footprint for Digital-Tutors in the CG industry. Digital-Tutors is used in top art schools across the globe to help instructors have more time focusing on what they do best.

Chee Pearlman is an editor and curator. She is the curator of the Curry Stone Design Prize, a foundation that produces documentaries and awards grants to global social impact designers. She has directed a number of large-scale international design conferences, including “Radical Craft,” “Serious Play” and “Stories from the Source” at Art Center College of Design, and she was a guest curator for the TED conference last year. Pearlman has co-edited books with a number of designers, including David Rockwell, Stefan Sagmeister and Tibor Kalman, and she has contributed design journalism to The New York Times, Newsweek and Travel + Leisure. She has served on the boards of AIGA, Art Directors Club and the American Society of Magazine Editors. Pearlman is the former editor-in-chief of I.D. Magazine, which received five National Magazine Awards under her tenure.

Shel Perkins is a graphic designer, management consultant and educator with more than twenty years of experience in managing the operations of leading design firms in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. He provides management consulting services to a range of creative firms in both traditional and new media. He has written the “Professional Practice”column for STEP magazine, the Design Business newsletter for AIGA and the “Design Firm Management”column for Graphics.com. The revised and expanded second edition of his best-selling book, Talent Is Not Enough: Business Secrets For Designers, is available from New Riders. Perkins teaches graduate-level courses in professional practices, and he has given presentations and workshops for many organizations, including IDSA, SEGD, HOW, ACD, Dynamic Graphics, STEP, Seybold, APDF, PromaxBDA, InSource, RGD Ontario and the Graphic Artists Guild. He has served on the national boards of AIGA and the Association of Professional Design Firms. He is currently chairman of the AIGA Center for Practice Management.

Allan Peters is a designer from Minneapolis, Minnesota. After graduating from The College of Visual Arts, he worked for three small graphic design shops where he honed his design style. Next, Peters shifted his career and took a job at BBDO, the most-awarded ad agency in the world, where he learned the art of advertising. Peters is currently a senior art director at Target’s in-house studio. While at Target, he rebranded the company’s core brand imagery and designed the iconic Threshold logo, which was the cornerstone of the largest rebrand in Target’s history. His work has been recognized by every major design publication, and Graphic Design USA named him a person to watch in 2013. Peters authors the most influential design blog in the Midwest; it reaches more than 100,000 page views per month.

Doug Powell is a designer and studio lead at IBM in Austin, Texas where he is helping to build the vision for IBM Design, a global effort to bring design into one of the largest and most successful companies in the world. Prior to joining IBM in 2013, Powell was an independent designer, strategist and entrepreneur leading successful projects for a wide range of clients and collaborative partners in health and nutrition, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, LifeScan and Pepsico. He recently served as consulting creative director for HealthSimple, working in close collaboration with the Johnson & Johnson Global Design team.

Powell is the immediate past national president of AIGA. He has been a leading force in the successful launch of Design for Good, the AIGA initiative to ignite, amplify and accelerate design-driven social change.

A 1988 graduate of the School of Art at Washington University in St. Louis, Powell is a lecturer, commentator and thought leader on design issues, having presented at a variety of national conferences and forums including “Bright Ideas” on Minnesota Public Radio, the 2011 Mayo Clinic “Transform” conference and the 2012 TEDx ArtCenter.

Mark Randall is principal of Worldstudio, a New York City strategy and communications firm that builds bridges between clients and communities to enable positive social change. In 2009, Worldstudio launched Design Ignites Change in collaboration with Adobe Foundation to support architects and designers who want to make a difference in their communities. Randall is the chair of Impact! Design for Social Change, an annual six-week summer intensive at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He lectures regularly on social design at colleges, universities and industry conferences such as AIGA and HOW. Randall was recently included on the Public Interest Design 100 list, which featured people and teams working at the intersection of design and service. Randall currently serves on the advisory board for desigNYC and the committee of the Times Square Arts Advisors. He also served on the national board of AIGA.

Ruki Ravikumar was born and raised in Chennai, India. She has a bachelor’s degree in the history of fine art and drawing and painting from the University of Madras, India, and an M.F.A. in graphic design from Iowa State University. Ravikumar has more than 10 years of experience as a design educator and more than 15 years of experience as a graphic designer, with clients in India, the United Kingdom and the United States. She presently serves as the chairperson and director of graduate programs in design at the University of Central Oklahoma. Ravikumar has a long history of service to AlGA; she is currently the president of the AlGA Oklahoma chapter. She has also held the positions of vice president, secretary, treasurer, education chair and communications chair for AlGA Oklahoma and co-chair of the AIGA Design Educators Community Steering Committee. Ravikumar's cross-cultural life and design experience has led her to research, present and publish work that investigates the intersections between graphic design and culture and their impact on design education

Award-winning graphic designer, artist and author Patrick Redmond has presented at UNESCO, Icograda and National Council on the Arts conferences. He has also demonstrated computer graphics at ACM SIGGRAPH. Redmond has worked as an art director for Norwest (Wells Fargo) and Carlson Companies, and as a graphic designer for The Goldstein Museum of Design, InterDesign and De brey Design. He cofounded COMCEPT Computer Graphics.

Redmond has taught at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis College of Art and Design and College of Visual Arts in Saint Paul, among others. A past president of AIGA Minnesota, Redmond has worked on a variety of projects and initiatives including AIGA Minnesota Design Camp®, the Design for Society Award and the Veteran Designers committee. His brand identity and design firm, Patrick Redmond Design, is based in Saint Paul, and he has created design for more than 130 clients. Redmond holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Minnesota.

Jesse Reed is a graduate of the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning with a B.S. in design. Immediately after graduating in the summer of 2010, he moved to New York City and joined the Department of Advertising and Graphic Design at the Museum of Modern Art. A year later, he went on to work for Michael Bierut at the New York office of Pentagram Design, where he currently oversees accounts for Saks Fifth Avenue, the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, BigApps NYC and Penguin Random House, among others. In addition to Pentagram, he works on various freelance design projects and operates Chip Slip, LLC, which he founded in early 2012.

Alexis Reid is a student at Missouri State University, majoring in graphic design, illustration and interactive new media. Born and raised in Kansas City, Reid has been interning at design studios in the area since she was 17. Most recently, Reid was at Willoughby Design, where she worked on a variety of projects in package design and brand identity, all while developing her long-forgotten kickball skills. In her free time, she is currently designing a new typeface, teaching herself code and creating pieces for her hand-lettering website, A Certain Type.

A native of Mexico City, Paulina Reyes ventured to the United States more than 10 years ago, beginning her career at Laurie DeMartino Design in Minneapolis. Reyes later moved on to Duffy & Partners and then to New York, where she has lent her creative skills to several prominent companies, including Kate Spade. Since 2011, she has been a design director at Mother New York. Throughout her career, Reyes has had the opportunity to work on a wide array of projects, both as a designer and an illustrator. In 2008, she collaborated with the Nature Conservancy on “Design for a Living World,” an exhibition highlighting products made from natural resources that debuted at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. She has also created textile prints for companies such as West Elm and WHIT. Reyes’ eclectic background has earned her a variety of recognitions, including being named a Young Gun 5 by the Art Directors Club and a “Twenty Under Thirty” by Print magazine. She has taught at the School of Visual Arts and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Early in his career, Douglas Riccardi established himself as a leading-edge visual designer with an innate capacity for strategic thinking. He worked with a number of influential and innovative international design firms, including Tibor Kalman’s M&Co in New York, Benetton Group SpA in Treviso, Italy and Ettore Sottsass’ Sottsass Associati in Milan.

Returning to the United States in 1993 to form his own firm, Riccardi envisioned MEMO as a category-defying studio: its creative and strategic talents would touch every aspect of brand identity via the language of design. As lead designer and strategist, Riccardi is involved with every studio account, whether conceiving a brand’s identity or ensuring it evolves with relevance and power.

Jeff Scher is a painter and experimental filmmaker. His work is in the permanent collection of numerous museums including the Museum of Modern Art. His work has been featured at the opening night of the New York Film Festival and screened at film festivals around the world. He has also created work for HBO, PBS, IFC and the Sundance Channel, and music videos for Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and others. He has made more than 30 films for his NYTimes.com Opinionator blog, “The Animated Life.” A selection of these films, “The Best of Times,” was published as an iPhone and iPad app. Scher teaches at the School of Visual Arts and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He attended Bard College and the American Film Institute.

Thomas Schneider has more than 20 years of experience in visual and interaction design, customer experience, corporate identity, brand development and project management. He successfully built and managed multidisciplinary teams on large projects from concept through execution in contexts ranging from start-ups to global corporations. Before joining Fjord, Schneider led the digital creative team at SolutionSet. His work included the development of a digital health monitoring and coaching tool for WebMD and a SMB learning platform for Google. He previously served as design director at Autodesk’s worldwide marketing group, helping expand the role of web-based touchpoints across consumer and reseller channels. Schneider also served as a design director at Wired during its formative first six years.

J. J. Sedelmaier is responsible for many of the most-talked-about broadcast productions of the past two decades including the launch season of MTV’s Beavis and Butt-Head, Saturday Night Live’s “Saturday TV Funhouse,” Cartoon Network/Adult Swim’s Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, animation for The Colbert Report and more than 500 television commercials, animations and design pieces. His creative development and production studio assists with corporate branding for companies like The Chicago Tribune, Nickelodeon, S. C. Johnson, Alka-Seltzer/Bayer and Converse. Sedelmaier’s design expertise, technological experience and extensive knowledge of history make him a unique creative source for sculpting any project. Sedelmaier is also a popular speaker for major industry events, corporations, schools, agencies and television programs such as CBS’ Sunday Morning. He is also a contributor to Print’s blog, “Imprint.” Sedelmaier’s interests are varied. If you Google him, you may become confused.

Nathan Shedroff is the chair of the groundbreaking M.B.A. in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. This innovative business program prepares the next generation of leaders for a world that is profitable, sustainable, ethical and truly meaningful. It unites the perspectives of systems thinking, sustainability, integrative thinking and generative leadership into a holistic strategic framework; students learn to create innovative products, services, policy and new business models.

Shedroff is a pioneer, expert and author in experience, interaction and information design, sustainability and strategy. His books include Experience Design 1.1, Making Meaning, Design is the Problem, Design Strategy in Action and Make It So. Shedroff earned an M.B.A. in sustainable management from Presidio Graduate School and a B.S. in industrial design from Art Center College of Design. He serves on the board of directors for Teague, a global design consultancy, and AIGA.

Bonnie Siegler is chair of “Head, Heart, Hand: AIGA Design Conference,” having previously co-created and chaired AIGA design for film and television conferences. She is the co-founder of Eight and a Half, a multidisciplinary design studio based in New York. Her clients include Brooklyn Public Library, HBO, The Criterion Collection, Random House, Warner Brothers Television, Nickelodeon and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation. Before Eight and a Half, she co-founded design studio Number 17 in 1993, and before that, she worked at MTV Networks. Her studio’s work is in the permanent design archives of AIGA, and she has served on the national board and as treasurer of the New York chapter. Her work has been recognized by the Art Directors Club, the Type Directors Club, the Webby Awards and the Broadcast Design Association. Siegler was recently voted one of the 50 most influential designers working today by Graphic Design USA. She has taught for many years in the masters programs at both Yale University and the School of Visual Arts. Siegler is also a 2014 Koopman Distinguished Chair in the Visual Arts at the University of Hartford.

Christopher Simmonsis a Canadian-born, San Francisco-based designer, writer, design advocate and educator. As principal and creative director of the San Francisco design office, MINE™, Simmons designs and directs brand and communication design projects for clients ranging from Facebook and Microsoft to the Edible Schoolyard Project and Obama for America. His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and the Smithsonian Institution.

Simmons is the author of four books and occasionally writes for design blogs and publications. From 2004 to 2006, he served as president of the San Francisco chapter of AIGA and founded San Francisco Design Week—prompting then-mayor Gavin Newsom to issue an official proclamation declaring San Francisco to be a city where “Design Makes a Difference.” In 2013, Graphic Design USA named Simmons one of “the 50 most influential designers working today.”

Julie Spivey is associate professor of graphic design at the University of Georgia’s School of Art. She also runs Type-A Creative, specializing in publication design and all things typographic. She has been active member of AIGA for many years and has served on the board of AIGA Raleigh. She is currently co-chair of the AIGA Design Educators Community Steering Committee. Her work has been recognized by AIGA, The ADDY Awards, Print Magazine, the University & College Designer’s Association, Communication Arts and Creative Quarterly, among others.

Matthew Sporzynski is a Manhattan-based illustrator and designer. He founded Couturier de Cardboard Inc. in 1999 and quickly garnered praise from the international fashion press. Vogue described Matthew’s work as “three-dimensional objets d’art that transcend their humble paper origins.” Couturier de Cardboard Inc. produces party invitations, displays and promotional materials for clients including Polo Ralph Lauren, Derek Lam, Cartier and The Estée Lauder Companies. The popularity of these mass-produced works led to collaborations with leading art directors and photographers who enlist Sporzynski to create paper scenes ranging from ornate, dollhouse-size miniatures to life-size fashion sets and paper clothing. Sporzynski’s paper illustrations have appeared in Town & Country, Real Simple, Harper’s Bazaar and many other publications. Target, New Balance and Sherwin-Williams Paints have commissioned illustrations for advertising and promotion. Sporzynski works with the full spectrum of paper, including corrugated cardboard, paper plates, crepe paper, paint chips and sheets of currency. He studied communication design at Parsons, and has taught package design there since 2000.

Matt Stevens is a designer and illustrator currently living and working in North Carolina. He has spent the majority of his career in small- to mid-sized brand shops and agencies as a designer and creative director. In early 2012 he opened the Design Office of Matt Stevens to pursue his own clients and incorporate more illustration into his daily practice. He currently works on a mix of brand identity and design-heavy illustration projects. Stevens is a strong advocate for self-initiated work and his pursuit of personal projects has led to opportunities to work with many great brands. The MAX100 Project was an exploration of form and concept using his lifelong sneaker fascination as its subject. This project began as a daily web series and became a self-published book that led to an ongoing collaboration with Nike Global and Nike Sportswear. Selected clients include Evernote, Facebook, JJ’s Red Hots, New York Magazine, TBWA London, Leo Burnett, the Salvation Army, Money, Sony Music and Wired.

Margaret Gould Stewart is director of product design at Facebook, Inc., leading the company’s user experience efforts to connect people to businesses and brands in powerful ways, and making Facebook a highly effective marketing platform for businesses, both small and large. Prior to coming to Facebook, she spent three years leading UX for YouTube, and two years leading search and consumer products UX at Google. Stewart has been a practitioner and manager in the field of user experience for more than 15 years. After graduating from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program in 1995, Stewart consulted extensively with New York media companies such as The New York Times, Time Warner and Scholastic, helping them develop their first forays into the web. She’s held leadership roles at a variety of high-profile startups and corporations including Tripod.com, which was acquired by Lycos, Inc. and Wachovia. Stewart is a member of the board of Architecture for Humanity, and she has served on the jury for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards. She is a frequent speaker about design, user experience, creative management and the changing landscape of media.

Since 1998, designer Scott Stowell has been doing business as Open, where he has grown by not growing, specialized in not really specializing and (as described in the Cooper-Hewitt’s “DesignUSA” show) embraced “an open notion of the term ‘office,’ inviting different participants to every project.” In 2008, Stowell was named the winner of the National Design Award for Communication Design.

Open is an independent design studio whose projects include identity systems for Bravo and New York Public Radio, editorial design for GOOD magazine and Stanford’s d.school, short films for Jazz at Lincoln Center and Time, architectural signage for Brooklyn Bridge Park and Yale University, and integrated campaigns for Google and Patagonia.

Jason Fulford is a photographer and co-founder of the nonprofit J&L Books. He is a contributing editor at Blind Spot and a frequent lecturer at universities. Fulford’s monographs include Sunbird (2000), Crushed (2003), Raising Frogs For $$$ (2006), The Mushroom Collector (2010), Hotel Oracle (2013) and Gestalt or the Whole Enchilada (2013). Tamara Shopsin is a graphic designer and illustrator whose work has been featured in The New York Times, GOOD, Time, Wired and Newsweek. She is the author of Mumbai New York Scranton and the designer of the “5 Year Diary.” She is also a cook at her family’s restaurant in New York. Fulford and Shopsin first collaborated in 2005 on a wedding ceremony that ended with a black eye and a trombone parade through New York City’s West Village. They have since worked together on books, illustrations and videos including Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin (Knopf, 2008), “Cooking with Dexter” (The New York Times Magazine, 2010), and “Kate Bush—Wuthering Heights—The true story.”

Lucille Tenazas is a graphic designer and the Henry Wolf Professor of Communication Design at Parsons The New School for Design. She is the founder and principal of Tenazas Design, a communication and graphic design firm working primarily on projects for cultural institutions, which was founded in San Francisco and is now based in New York. Her journey from the Philippines to San Francisco, combined with her collective experience living on the West and East coasts of the United States, have had a profound effect on her work. This creative trajectory has resulted in a hybrid aesthetic and a lifelong interest in the complexity of language and the overlapping relationship of meaning, form and content.

Tenazas was the recipient of the National Design Award in Communication Design from the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in 2002, and she was recently honored with the AIGA Medal for a lifetime of achievement in design.

Jennifer Thibault is a senior designer at Reboot, a social enterprise working to improve governance and development worldwide. Thibault ensures the integrity of Reboot’s visual identity and leads the creative team. She focuses on designing clear, compelling and impactful communications to express the complex ideas in Reboot’s creative outputs. Thibault also drives all Reboot branding processes for both client engagements and in-house needs. Thibault has a background in graphic design and brand strategy, having developed visual identities—in addition to print and digital materials—for a range of socially-minded organizations. These include developing a brand system and collateral design for My Voice, an SMS-based social accountability platform for health and agriculture programs in Nigeria, and redesigning the visual interface of Poll Watch, a voter experience reporting app. Prior to Reboot, Thibault explored the relationship between social media, identity and personal branding in her own work on Hubbub, a social media aggregation platform.

Cameron Tonkinwise, associate professor and director of design studies at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, has a background in philosophy. Tonkinwise continues to research what designers can learn from philosophies of making, material culture studies and sociologies of technology. Tonkinwise is also chairing the committee that is currently restructuring the School of Design’s Ph.D. program. He has extensive experience with practice-based design research.

Tonkinwise comes to the School of Design from Parsons The New School for Design in New York City where he was the associate dean for sustainability. Before that, he served as co-chair of the Tishman Environment and Design Center and the chair of design thinking and sustainability in the School of Design Strategies. Previously, Tonkinwise was director of design studies at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia and executive director of Change Design, formerly known as the EcoDesign Foundation.

Tonkinwise’s primary area of research is sustainable design. He has published a range of articles on the role of design—in particular, service design—in the promotion of the sharing economy and collaborative consumption.

Matthew Trowbridge is a physician, public health researcher and assistant professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Dr. Trowbridge’s academic research focuses on the impact of architecture, urban design and transportation planning on public health issues including childhood obesity, traffic injury and pre-hospital emergency care. He is currently an advisor to the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research, a partnership between multiple federal and private funding agencies that focuses on built environment and childhood obesity prevention research development. Previously, he served as chair of the built environment and transportation planning subcommittee for the 2012 Centers for Disease Control’s “Weight of the Nation” obesity prevention conference and as senior advisor on built environment and childhood obesity prevention research at the National Cancer Institute at National Institutes of Health. Dr. Trowbridge was also recently named the 2013 Ginsberg Fellow by the U.S. Green Building Council for his work to promote healthier built environments. He is board certified in both general pediatrics and preventive medicine and obtained his medical and public health training at Emory University

Michael Vanderbyl has gained international prominence in the design field as a practitioner, educator, critic and advocate. His firm, Vanderbyl Design, has evolved into a multidisciplinary studio with expertise in identity, print and digital communications, interiors, showrooms, retail spaces, signage, textiles, fashion apparel, packaging, furniture and product design. Vanderbyl received a B.F.A. in graphic design from the California College of Arts & Crafts (now California College of the Arts), where he is now a professor and dean of design. He has acted as visiting instructor at institutions such as the Cranbrook Academy of Art and Art Center College of Design. He is also the recipient of the Joyce C. Hall Distinguished Chair at the Kansas City Art Institute.

In 1987, Vanderbyl was elected a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale. He has served as president of the AIGA board of directors and was a founding member of the AIGA San Francisco chapter. In 1997, he was selected as one of I.D. magazine’s “I.D. Forty”. He has received lifetime achievement awards from the Pacific Design Center, the International Interior Design Association and AIGA. In 2012, Vanderbyl was inducted into Interior Design magazine’s Hall of Fame.

A self-taught design critic, Véronique Vienne was a magazine art director in the United States when she began writing in order to better understand the work of graphic designers, illustrators and photographers with whom she collaborated. She has written extensively on lifestyle trends, design ethics and business practices. Vienne has also edited, art-directed and written essays for a number of design publications including House and Garden, Emigre, Communication Arts, Eye, Graphis, Aperture, Metropolis,étapes and Print. Her latest book, co-authored with Steven Heller, is 100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design. She lives in France where she teaches in several art schools and conducts workshops on design criticism as a creative tool.

Award-winning designer Robert Villaflor has worked for several companies including ARCHITECTURE magazine and Time. He has served as the design director of the Corcoran Museum of Art and College of Art and Design in Washington, DC, and he was the founding art director for BLACK BOOK magazine in New York City. Villaflor is currently serving as the design director of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest civil rights organization in the country advocating for LGBT equality. He has served as an adjunct faculty member in graphic design at the Corcoran College of Art and Design. He received an M.F.A. in graphic design from Yale University and a B.A. in graphic design from Pennsylvania State University. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

Petrula Vrontikis is a leading voice in graphic design. She lectures at conferences, universities and to professional organizations worldwide about her work with Vrontikis Design Office, about graphic design education, and on the subject of professional practice. Vrontikis has taught the senior graphic design studies course at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena since 1989. In 2007, she received an AIGA Fellows Award honoring her as an essential voice raising the understanding of design within the industry and among the business and cultural communities of Los Angeles.

Alissa Walker writes about design, architecture, cities, transportation and walking for publications like Dwell, Fast Company, GOOD, Wired, Details, LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. She is also an associate producer for the KCRW public radio show DnA: Design and Architecture. In 2010 she was named a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow for her writing on design and urbanism, and in 2011 she was awarded an ArtPlace grant for the initiative “GOOD Ideas for Cities,” where creatives propose solutions to urban problems identified by city leaders and present their ideas at lively public forums. Walker lives in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles where she throws ice cream socials, tends to a drought-tolerant garden, writes infrequently on her blog and relishes life without a car.

Rob Wallace is the managing partner of Wallace Church Inc., a Manhattan and San Francisco-based global brand identity, strategy and package design consultancy. Often referred to as “the thought-leader on design’s return on investment,” he works with some of the world’s smartest and most successful consumer brands on their most critical consumer connection, brand identity and package design. Wallace’s current clients include Procter & Gamble, Nestle, Pepsico, Target, Anheuser-Busch, Dell, Bacardi, Colgate-Palmolive, Unilever, Revlon, Mead Johnson and more than three-dozen global consumer packaged goods corporations of equal caliber. Wallace is the co-author of Really Good Packaging Explained, a contributing author of Build Your Own Brand, a proud member of the board of directors of the Design Management Institute and a frequent speaker at more than 40 industry symposia across North and South America, Europe and Asia. He lectures at Columbia Business School and the M.B.A. programs of Georgetown, Seton Hall and the University of Texas. He is a thesis advisor for the masters branding program at the School of Visual Arts.

Mike Weikert is founding director of the Center for Social Design and Master of Arts in Social Design at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). In 2008, he established the Center for Design Practice at MICA, a multidisciplinary studio engaging students and outside partners in socially conscious projects. Previously, he served as co-chair of the graphic design department at MICA, partner and creative director at Atlanta-based Iconologic and design consultant to the International Olympic Committee. He also worked as a designer with Pentagram and taught at the Portfolio Center in Atlanta. His work has been recognized in various books and publications, and he has received grants from Sappi | Ideas That Matter, the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2011, Weikert was nominated for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award.

Maria Wennerstrum is a creative manager at Target, where she currently manages the CityTarget weekly ad. Her comprehensive Target work includes art direction and graphic design on food promotions and packaging; fashion packaging for Cherokee, Mossimo, Gilligan & O’Malley and Merona; as well as design work on seasonal campaigns. Prior to Target, Wennerstrum created for brands like POM Wonderful pomegranate juice, Mark by Avon, Nike, Adidas and Kangol. She is on the Target women’s business council advisory committee and the board of directors for Contempo Physical Dance.

Michael Westcott is the president of the Design Management Institute (DMI), the largest global community of design and innovation leaders. With an executive and academic community of more than 24,000 representing top-tier organizations, DMI connects design leaders to the inspiration, knowledge and community needed to succeed. Prior to DMI, Westcott started Relate Solutions to help transform the web from pages and links to places where people meet and do business. He served as the vice president of marketing for the virtual business software leader, INXPO, and he has founded several agencies including Firebrand and Fitch Boston. He also ran the Event Marketing Institute at Red 7 Media and helped turn George P. Johnson into the leading global experience agency.

He has created innovative and highly successful programs in online and offline marketing and communication for such companies as IBM, Cisco, GE Healthcare, Toyota, Chrysler, Jeep, FedEx and many others. He has delivered interactive keynote speeches and workshops to Event Marketing Summit, ASAE, Event Camp, ExpoSystems Brazil, IDSA and others.

Lorraine Wild is a graphic designer in Los Angeles. Her design firm, Green Dragon Office, focuses on collaborative work with artists, architects, curators, editors and publishers. In addition, she serves as the creative director of the design department of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, consulting on publications, exhibitions and design for public outreach. She is a member of the faculty of the California Institute of the Arts. In 2006, Wild received the most prestigious award in the U.S. for graphic design: the AIGA Medal. She has also received numerous awards from the New York Art Directors Club, American Center for Design, the American Institute of Architects, the American Alliance of Museums and the American Association of University Publishers. Wild’s award-winning books have been included in AIGA’s “50 Books/50 Covers” competition more than 25 times. Recent projects include the design of books and exhibition catalogues for the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Wild is a graduate of the Cranbrook Academy of Art and the Yale School of Art.

Ethan Wilkes is the director of communications at Reboot, a social enterprise working to improve governance and development worldwide. As chief storyteller, he is charged with bringing Reboot’s “people first” vision of change-making to a global audience. He is also responsible for overseeing Reboot’s creative team. Wilkes comes from a diverse international background spanning four continents and over 50 countries. From Paris, he helped launch the JDC International Centre for Community Development at Oxford University. In Beijing, he advised the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs on public diplomacy strategy during the 2008 Summer Olympic Games. More recently, he served in theOffice of Press and Public Diplomacy at the United States Mission to the United Nations. Wilkes is a graduate of the American University of Paris and holds a master of international affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. His writing has been featured in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, World Policy Journal and International Policy Digest, among others.

Ann Willoughby is founder and chief creative officer of Willoughby Design, a brand innovation and identity design firm she founded in 1978. Willoughby has developed groundbreaking brand identities for the United Nations, Kauffman Labs, Noodles & Co., SPIN! Pizza, Feng, Lee Jeans, Hallmark Cards, Hershey and Hostess. Ever active with AIGA, Willoughby served on the national board of directors and was named Kansas City’s first national AIGA Fellow in 2006. An international speaker, design judge, teacher and writer, Willoughby helped launch the pilot AIGA design leadership program at Harvard and the Aspen Design Summit. As a member of the Designers Accord and Living Principles, Willoughby was also a leader in adopting sustainable design practices. Willoughby Design has become an acknowledged expert as one of the leading international brand identity firms consulting with companies on the forefront of educational, business and cultural innovation.

Danny Yount is a main title designer and director for film and television. He has received many industry awards, including two Emmys and one Emmy nomination. Yount has designed and directed feature film main titles including Tron: Legacy, Oblivion, Sherlock Holmes and Iron Man 1, 2 and 3. Yount also designed the Hologram sequences from Tony Stark’s lab for the Iron Man franchise. His work on Kiss Kiss Bang Bang earned him a place on IFC’s “50 Greatest Opening Title Sequences of All Time.” Yount has spoken at AgIdeas International Design Week, F5, Semi-Permanent, Gravity Free and “Future. Innovation. Technology. Creativity.” His work has been featured in several publications, including Creative Review, Creativity, Wired, TV Guide, Digital Arts, ProDesign, Idealog and Communication Arts.